


so unlike what i’ve seen before

by portions_forfox



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: M/M, Unrequited
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-30
Updated: 2012-05-30
Packaged: 2017-12-12 09:47:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/810187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/portions_forfox/pseuds/portions_forfox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>it’s slow in the sense that it builds up imperceptibly, block upon block and glance upon glance, brushes of the arm and kicks under a crowded table gradually stacking on top of each other until you’ve got—something. you’ve got something.</p>
            </blockquote>





	so unlike what i’ve seen before

**Author's Note:**

> Not real, etc, etc.

zayn thinks to himself, _so this_ —and he falls. _so this is what it’s like._

 

 

I.

 

our story starts here (because the only time zayn can remember being _the best_ at anything was in kindergarten music class, where julie andrews had sung and zayn had learned that to start at the very beginning is a very good place to start):

when zayn was just a boy, his mother stood on their front porch with her hands on her hips. watched him kiss lizzie jenkins from across the street on her cute button nose, then break the head off her barbie doll and run away laughing.

“that boy,” she said, and she shook her head for the first of many occasions, “is going to be a heartbreaker.”

 

-

 

in the seventh grade zayn’s father sits him down in the living room and leans forward so his elbows rest on his knees. leans back. leans forward again. clears his throat. says,

“your mother has asked that i—“ (it’s a mistake, a brutal one; her eyes widen and her lips purse; one look at her face and zayn’s father starts again.) “your mother and i both think that it’s—that it would be a good idea to—” (glance to her, fine so far) “—to have a conversation with you, zayn, about respecting women.” he leans back into the welcoming arms of his chair, visibly repressing a sigh of relief.

zayn’s mother cuts in from the other sofa, the one she’s not sitting on (instead, she leans against the armrest with her arms crossed, the perfect picture of parental disdain.)

“sally jensen’s mother called today,” she blurts out, eyes narrowing, foot tapping. “do you want to know what about?”

she waits for an answer. “yes?” guesses zayn.

“she said that sally came home crying today because zayn malik made her kiss him and then ripped her dress.” zayn’s mother’s eyebrows raise. “is that what happened?”

(what happened is this: 

zayn passed a note to amanda, who passed it to jaden, who passed it to tom, who passed it to sally, and the note said, _you look pretty in that dress. meet me behind the school at lunch?_ sally smiled, scribbled something and passed the note to tom, who passed it to jaden, who passed it to amanda, who read _ok!_

at lunch zayn fingers the hem of her dress, white and round with rows of little red cherries. made like he was bashful by blushing at the ground, then reached out and kissed her, once, on the mouth, the kiss assigned to her lips with bluntness and precision, a child’s handiwork.

“can i have a piece of your dress?” he asked, “to keep with me always and remember you by?” (he’d heard it in a movie once, and it worked with sophie holt.)

sally doesn’t think to wonder how the request makes any sense— _but zayn, we go to school together, we see each other every day, why would you need to remember me?_ —because she is a child and she is in love and love, they say, is blind.

she tears off enough for four cherries, and suddenly zayn’s bashful smile is less a grin than a sneer, and sally jenkins feels an inkling of something coiling in the pit of her stomach, something like dread.

zayn scampers off immediately, shouting, “tom! robbie! look what i got off her!” waving the shred of her dress in the air like a token, and as the the three of them huddle together, glancing and whispering and pointing over at her, the dread in sally’s stomach goes cold. she thinks of her mother at the sewing machine, the pump and kick of the pedal, the days it had taken, the beaming smile on her mother's face as she handed it to her, _sally, look what i made you._ the dread turns to something like shame.

sally runs home crying.)

“is that what happened” zayn’s mother is asking, insistently now, and it takes all zayn has not to smirk (he hasn’t learned, not yet). 

“sure,” he says. “that’s what happened.”

 

-

 

people used to say that the dance team were the human equivalent of their own perfectly quaffed sausage curls—beautiful in every way but tighter than their short shorts.

zayn fucked them all.

 

-

 

this is how it works:

(zayn remembers the day julie andrews taught him to sing, remembers _so da la ti me re do_ , remembers olivia naughton who looked up from beneath her golden lashes after he sang it back in perfect tune to mrs peterson. remembers julie andrews spinning in the background as olivia naughton’s eyes went wide, and she smiled at him.)

you know who he is. you’ve heard the rumors because it’s impossible _not_ to have heard the rumors. _you stay away from him_ , they say— _he’ll cut you up and eat you whole_ , or something, something like that. you look at trina mavis, or gracie mcmanus or marnie pratt (crying in the bathroom, scribbling _fuck you_ on the mirrors; _slut_ , you whisper to your friend) and you think to yourself, _how stupid_. how fucking stupid they must be.

and then.

and then the teacher says, _i won't have you sulking in the back, mr malik—move up to the front of the classroom. and take off that ridiculous jacket, you’re not james dean._

he slides into the seat next to you and there’s no need for him to sulk with words when he can do it with his body language, slumping into the seat and leaning back with his legs spread wide.

_take one, pass it down_ , says the teacher, and you reach across with a manicured hand to place the sheet on his side of the desk. he catches sight of your nails—candy apple red, the bottle had declared—and slowly turns his head. smiles at you.

he blushes and looks down at the ground, then—like he can’t resist another glimpse, like you’re that magnetic a source—he flicks up his eyes, guarded but curious, and as he does it you can see his eyelashes curl up and out into infinity.

_fuck you, zayn malik_ , you’ll scratch in red lipstick on the mirror.

_slut_ , they’ll whisper in the halls.

 

-

 

unless, of course.

“why did you do it?” the girl with any semblance of tact might ask you (to your face, that’s the main point here. to your face.) “we told you not to do it, so why did you do it?”

there’s no acceptable answer, really. you could say a thousand things but none of them would really work—the truth is, you knew all along.

there is only one excuse.

“have you heard him sing?”

“oh,” says the girl, and nods. “oh.”

 

-

 

_you might not know this about our zayn malik_ , teachers say, _but he is one of those beautiful boys who can get away with just about anything they like_. 

_hm_ , says the headmistress, and she rolls her eyes, taps ash from her cigarette into the tray by her desk. _and to think i’d never have guessed._

 

-

 

in the bleak midwinter months come reesa harper, conjured out of some shitty state school (kind of like this one, but back in east london so worse) to the long, shiny ( _shiny_ ’s only ever spoken with sarcasm) hallways of tong high school, and.

her nails are sharp and long, bitten down and chipping black. if you leave class to go to the loo you can hear her scraping them along the stairwell, black-rimmed brown eyes constantly sighing at the world. she lets her fringe hang in her eyes, lets it get greasy and the girls whisper _who does she think she is, some sort of eighties stereotype?_ but that’s exactly what she is, isn’t it, and it’s the fact that she’s not _trying_ to be that makes her so cool.

she strolls past the back of the school at lunch one day, where the bad kids-slash-social exiles go to smoke and zayn malik goes to corrupt the M.U.N. captain. they bad kids had tried to recruit her, of course—they’d thought she was one of them, with her spider tattoo and her combat boots—but she wasn’t, really. she wasn’t trying to belong anywhere. so all she did was smirk.

she smirked at the back of janey morrison’s head, smirked right into zayn malik’s open eyes as he shoved a hand up janey’s shirt, smirked and walked on still smirking.

zayn finished fucking janey, and after school he called up reesa harper.

_fuck you, zayn malik_ , she carved into the walls above the stairwell, black nail polish chipping in the creases.

 

-

 

this is how it works:

he runs a couple fingers through his hair, says something about real music being dead today. something about john lennon being god, a flutter of eyelashes. something about intelligence in women, something about cultural expectations, something something something, and a look. he plays it like he’s shy, all subtle upward glances and color rising to his cheeks and embarrassed compliments.

that doesn’t really change when he’s famous.

 

 

II.

 

part two of our story begins with a boy, a boy named liam payne.

(after reesa harper, the girls knew it was the end. knew there was really no hope for zayn malik, because if she couldn’t break him, she with her failing grades and black-tipped fringe and careless smirk, if she couldn’t break him, then nobody could.

youth are easily mistaken.)

the first time zayn meets liam—well. he doesn’t really meet him, he just thinks of it that way sometimes. it’s after the first round at the x factor, and liam’s standing around chatting with a couple other contestants—people he’s just met— _just met_ —and he’s got on one of those zip-up hoodies and a pair of sweatpants with the proud logo of some school or another on the right hip, and he’s smiling very good-naturedly. _good-naturedly_ , for fuck’s sake. zayn can see that some of the people he’s talking to are girls, and he knows—fuck, he knows what it looks like when a bloke’s trying to get into a girl’s pants, he knows every goddamned variation on the theme, and this is not what it looks like. liam payne—somehow he’s connecting the name with the face, somehow he’s heard those three simple syllables roll around camp these past few days—liam payne is the type of guy who has girls who are friends. _girls_ , who are _friends_.

zayn desperately wants to smirk right now, and instead _seems like a nice enough kid_ pops up in his head. liam is one of those sugar-sweet wholesome things you can love ironically, like kids’ telly or nineties pop.

 

-

 

the second time, it’s _you’re going to be in a band_. zayn looks around—there’s a mop-haired kid who acts femme but still kind of likes girls, a curly-haired kid who doesn’t act femme but still kind of likes boys, and what looks like a blond irish child lost at the zoo.

zayn almost wants to light up a smoke, spit, _fuck that_.

(and then, you know. there’s liam payne.)

_okay_ , zayn says. _okay_.

(liam payne, you might say, is the exact opposite of reesa harper in every single way.)

 

-

 

it happens rather slower than you might think. or faster, depending on how you look at it.

it’s fast in that a year or two or three in the context of hundreds, _thousands_ of years of people living and dying and falling in love is absolutely nothing, just, you know, a tiny little chip in the mosaic of time. if you look at it that way, then yeah, it’s fast, it’s pretty damn fast.

but it’s slow in the sense that it builds up imperceptibly, block upon block and glance upon glance, brushes of the arm and kicks under a crowded table gradually stacking on top of each other until you’ve got—something. you’ve got something.

(zayn remembers the way he used to catch little glimpses, up from between thick lashes, at the good girls in class, how they’d stare back and slide one tooth into the red curve of their bottom lip, the way he’d smile a little and look away. it was exhilarating, yeah, but he’d never been less than a hundred percent certain it meant more to them than it ever did to him.)

he gets famous.

or rather, one direction does.

(stunningly, mindblowingly famous.)

 

 

III.

 

for someone as smart as liam, he really does have awful grammar.

zayn’s scrolling through his phone, twitter and whatnot, while sun streams through the glass door in their hotel room and liam shoots at nazi zombies on the plasma screen.

“ ’ey li,” zayn says, slow smirk already crawling up his lips (smirking’s one skill that’s come in extra handy with fame), “can i just ask you a quick question, is that all right…?”

liam doesn’t move his eyes from the screen. he darts with one hand for the sandwich he’s managed to simultaneously eat (niall’s—zayn doesn’t suspect liam’ll still be alive come his return) and shifts on his stomach, jostling the bed.

“yeah sure,” he answers distractedly, and before he can protest zayn shoves the phone into his focused gaze and laughs, “what the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

there’s a jumble of letters and text abbreviations, something well-meaning and liamish like, _i just want 2 say thx so much 4 all youre suport, we coudnt of done it w/o u._

liam promptly gets shot, loses the round, bitches and moans, then shoves zayn’s torso so he almost topples off the bed, both giggling.

“shut up, all right?” liam says between fits of crinkle-eyed laughter, and he turns back to the game for another go. “there’s a reason i went out for the x factor instead of an english degree.”

“no shit,” zayn wheezes, settling sideways on the bed so his head dangles off and his legs cross over the backs of liam’s calves. ever since one direction, the both of them have had to adjust to extraordinarily tactile companions, until eventually they became ones themselves. even, you know, when it’s just the two of them.

“yeah, well, i thank fans with grammatically incorrect tweets,” sighs liam, tossing a grenade into an abandoned warehouse, “and you thank them by helping them oh-so-subtly sneak out your hotel balcony.”

it was meant to be a joke, zayn knows, but he looks up and liam’s not smiling anymore, and maybe that shouldn’t make him as happy as it does.

 

-

 

_you’re kind of wonderful_ , zayn finds himself thinking more often than not.

 

-

 

danielle’s rather lovely, zayn thinks. she’s fun and nice and she’s got a great sense of humor. she fits in well with the five of them and she’s sweet, which is—which matches liam. all of it matches liam, really.

still, it’s kind of fucking stupid how zayn’s head turns toward liam’s as if by reflex as often as it can. it’s especially fucking stupid when it happens during “more than this,” and after that it’s not stupid at all, it just hurts.

 

-

 

liam’s first time getting high is with zayn, alone with zayn. when he does it, his eyes flutter closed a moment too long every time he blinks, and his hands are slow and wobbly as he tries to gesticulate while explaining something, and with the balcony open and cool night air rushing in the two can hear voices at the pool, voices calling out and whooping and leaping into the water, head first, eyes squeezed shut, voices humming into lovers’ ears on the sidewalk, drunk voices and silent voices, cut off by the quick lurching kiss of another, as much a leap as the curling swan dive into the deep end. voices living and dying and falling in love, and it’s nice to remember that without one direction life goes on, that zayn is still just zayn malik and liam is still just liam payne. some things never change, and some, you know, they do.

liam sighs and leans his head against zayn’s shoulder, murmurs, “you know, you ought to be more careful when you’re sneaking girls back out at night, ’cos like, you know, i can…i can hear you.” and it’s like he knows zayn’ll be looking at him, because he lifts up his heavy lids to reveal darkly shaded round brown eyes, and suddenly zayn forgets he should be smirking. he always smirks before he leans in for a kiss.

(but they did say, they did warn him, that liam payne is the exact opposite of reesa harper in every way.)

liam slides his hands up zayn’s shirt and zayn feels the tips of ten cautious fingers curling across his abdomen and up, and then zayn slips his tongue into liam’s mouth and knots his fingers into the hair at the nape of liam’s neck, and then liam breathes out through his nose and so does zayn, and it’s very lazy and very slow how zayn reaches down and tugs at the hem of liam’s shirt, lifting it up over his head and settling there between li’s legs. it’s very slow indeed.

 

-

 

in the morning, right before their interview, liam pulls zayn aside and runs a hand through his hair (which brings back a flood of memories, the night before. not helping). he darts his eyes around, past zayn’s shoulder and up at the ceiling and zayn feels something coiling in the pit of his stomach, something like dread. “we can't, you know…do that again.”

zayn imagines himself unbuckling liam’s belt with care and sliding it out of each individual loophole, one by one, running his hands up the planes of liam’s hips, bending him over and fucking him slowly in the endless white sheets of their hotel room, sun streaming in through the open glass door.

instead, he says, “i know.”

 

 

zayn thinks to himself, _so this_ —and he falls in love. _so this is what it’s like._


End file.
